After the shower, he dresses to the nines. A nine thousand rupee V-neck sweater by Ralph Lauren over a thirty-two thousand rupee white shirt by Paul Smith; a pair of sixteen thousand rupee stone-coloured pants by Missoni accompanied by a pair of nine thousand five hundred rupee white Air Jordan. Among those from his personal collection, he chooses his grandfather’s watch, a Patek Philippe that Dad gave him for his eighteenth birthday.
***
Opening the car door in front of Candle Cove, Nil feels at ease in his Brook Brothers tweed jacket, despite it being unfit for the sultry evening, but you know, you have to suffer a bit in the name of style when the occasion requires it.
“Hey,” says Ferang, in the middle of the dusty yard.
“Hello,” Mel goes, standing next to him.
“Hello,” says Nil.
“Hey,” repeats Ferang
“Hey,” Nil and Mel say in unison.
Together they enter the bar.
“What shall we drink?” Ferang says, once at the usual table.
“Don’t know,” Mel says. “You, Nil?”
“I don’t know. You, Ferang?
“I don’t know!” he goes, smiling.
“Why not something new?”
“Percy!” goes Ferang.
“Yeah, Percy,” chirps Mel, “where are you?”
Nil raises his hand.
The waiter appears from the small door behind the counter. He looks joyful.
“Percy!” Ferang says.
“Hey, Percy!” Mel says.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” says the waiter, joining the collective cheer. “What shall I bring you?”
“Guys,” goes Ferang. “What do you want?”
“Good question,” Mel says.
“Yeah, what should we have?” says Nil.
“How about something new?” says Ferang.
“Yeah,” Nil goes and then he hesitates before saying, “Yes, something new.”
“Sure, guys.” Mel pushes a hair lock behind her ear. “But what?”
“Percy.” Ferang leans toward the waiter. “What do you recommend?”
“Something good,” says Nil.
“Right,” says Mel, “a drink that reflects us deeply.”
The waiter pretends to know how to think. The silence feels almost fatal. The Smoking Woman is not sitting at the counter. Music in the air. The waiter’s face lights up. He turns to Ferang. “How about a Chai Russian?”
A beat.
A beat.
A beat.
Nil feels something inside him screeching and chattering and—and—
“Of course!” Mel smiles broad. “Be it a Chai Russian. A Chai Russian!”
“Sure!” echoes the waiter. “For you, madam, a nice Gin Rickey. A nice Gin Rickey!”
Silence.
Mel and Ferang shoot their beautiful smiles at Nil, and he feels drenched in sweat and sees that both pretend not to see his hands shaking out of control.
“A Sazerac!” goes Ferang, beating the waiter to the draw, pointing at Nil.
“Of course,” the waiter says, avoiding Nil’s eyes. “Of course, sir, a Sazerac for you, sir.”
Mel laughs but no one follows, at first. Then Ferang, with haunted amusement, chuckles and bursts into laughter, and Nil does the same but he pretends, and the waiter imitates them like a the monkey he is, and everyone keeps laughing as he moves away and they are still laughing when he brings the drinks, and so all three of them together raise their glasses in a toast, and when Ferang orders a cheese pizza the others spit out their alcohol, tears streaming down their faces, scratching their cheeks, unable to stop, but then silence falls abruptly, and they down their cocktails at once.
Ferang sighs placing the glass on the table and smiles at Nil, who looks away to meet Mel’s eyes, which are bright and wild and radiant.
“So he’s dead,” someone says, and by the way Mel and Ferang freeze, Nil knows it’s him.
“But do we really die, for real I mean, after all?” says Ferang, stammering a little.
Mel is scrambling the melted ice in her glass with a straw.
“They always exaggerate,” says Ferang after a moment of stillness. “The media.” Ferang lifts his empty glass as if to drink, then he places it back on the table. “You guys know that more people are killed in Bombay every day taking the train than in situations like this?” He drinks up the ice in his glass and orders another round. “And the uprising,” he starts but then stops to look at the wood grain of the table. “Nothing will happen,” he says. “I know these people, they are emotional, when a political figure dies they commit mass suicide. This time is just the same. Tomorrow? They will already have forgotten.”
Mel says nothing.
“The Pit has a thick skin, sure it won’t be a...” Ferang seems to lose his train of thought and waves his hand in midair dismissing it. He drinks the shattered ice.
Nil feels a sharp pain in his hands and realizes he’s holding onto the table, gripping it till his knuckles go white, and when he lets go it’s hard to stretch his fingers and he needs to do a line.
He tastes something metallic on his lips and, fearing that his nose might be bleeding, he runs a hand on his upper lip but no, nothing but sweat—but what if the blood started to flow right after he checked or just because of the touch of his hand? and so, touching his upper lip again, he looks up and Ferang is looking at him, and Nil dissimulates, pretending to scratch his cheek—but what if Ferang’s watching him because the blood started flowing just now? and so he looks at his own fingers, but finds nothing, nothing at all.
They drink heavily. None of them seem to be able to get drunk. Nil listens to them talk about classmates and professors, about Netflix and the new iPhone, and then about Hegel and Sartre and Heidegger, to which Nil intervenes mentioning the arms trafficking in Azerbaijan, and then they talk about patriarchy, and the Middle East, and Beyoncé.
At the bar, the absence of the Smoking Woman is disturbing. Ferang’s playing Super Mario Run on his iPhone.
Mel says nothing. On her lips, perhaps, Nil sees the ghost of a smile, but he denies it to himself thinking it’s the natural curve of her mouth. Of course it is, it must be.
Nil thinks he might just lose his mind.
Then all three are on their iPhones, each one, Nil is certain of that, reading the news on the main national newspapers: “The Ragtag Kind is Dead” reads the Express. Even the Times was forced to cover the story, as shown by the flashy title on page 3, “Ayodhya Loses its Queen, and it’s Chaos”.
All three are reading the news but no one says a word. The name of Gabriel and Ameen floating in the air between them, but no one dares to say them. Even now, no newspaper dares writing them.
“He got away with it,” says Ferang, at last.
Nil looks at Mel. She looks away.
***
The driver is waiting for him in the car outside. Knocking on the window, Nil tells him to piss off. “Take a fucking taxi,” he says. Throws some money on his lap. Less than he needs.
Once at the wheel, Nil could push on the gas without removing the hand brake and enjoy the view of a cloud of dust swallowing the driver, but he doesn’t. He looks at him in the rearview mirror, and there he is, stocky, sad, awkward, and he just can’t.
He speeds through the city and parks the Mercedes in their usual place, far enough to feel safe from the invitation of the police station but close enough to hear its call. Nil eyes the building in the dim shine of the lampposts. The night feels sweetish and terrifyingly familiar.
The Crooked Woman has long been sitting next to him when Nil starts talking. “Know what?” Nil chuckles to himself. “Life is no fun when you’re sober. But I guess this is one of our lucky nights.” He laughs a little more, but when she doesn’t change expression, he stops. He lights a Benson.
“The truth, the truth, the truth,” he says. “You should have told me, you know? You should have told me how stupid I sounded—”
“You didn’t,” says the Crooked Woman, her eyes fixed on the police station.
Nil freezes for a moment, then shrugs. “I’ve always preached in favor of the truth, but at the same time I’ve always hid behind it, behind the shield of my own demons—the Blackness, the Whole, the Nothingness, call it whatever you want.” Nil licks his lips. Gunpowder. He chuckles. “I’ve always tried to fight off what I did, but the truth is that I was hiding behind it, honey.” He shivers. “But I see it now. There is no demon. There is one only if you believe there is.”
“Right and wrong are not a matter of opinion, Nil, we’ve been there before.” She sounds tired, her voice ringing like lost belief.
The ashes from his unsmoked cigarette fall on his clothes. Nil smiles. “Gray suits me, don’t you think?” He dusts his jacket. “What were we saying? Right, that it made me feel better to think of myself as part monster rather than an ambitious, lying, angry, unhappy human being. Be it, in fact, that what I did to you made me better than these worldly defects. It elevated me above all others.”
Shaking her head, the Crooked Woman says nothing. She breathes out.
“Part of me was ashamed of it, but it was a small part, easily ignorable. The rest of me was feasting on my own damnation. It made me better than the collective morality. It’s a tricky thing, you know, this thing about guilt. For some it’s a curse. For others, a blessing.” He tries to force his smile wider. “I know, you thought I couldn’t possibly sicken you more than I already had, and yet here I am. This is the real me.” Still smiling, he goes, “And I choose hope. Fuck the truth—I choose hope. I have to, do you understand? Otherwise I’ll die. I’ll—”
“What’s better?” says the Crooked Woman. “To be born good, or to conquer your own corrupt nature through great efforts?”
Taken aback, Nil ponders upon her words. He says, “I... This is who I am, and I cannot help it.”
“You can.”
“I can’t. I won’t.”
Silence.
“Be careful of what demons you chose to free yourself of,” she says. “What if your darkness is was what makes you special?”
Nil says nothing for a while. Then, “We all just want to belong.”
The Crooked Woman covers her face with her hands. “You will die without me,” she whispers. “You will.” But when Nil doesn’t answer, she lowers her hands, her face turned to stone, her words pebbles scratching slate. “So that’s it?” she says. “This is our last time here? You’re forgiving yourself? You’re moving on?”
Nil inhales, the Whole possessing him. “No. I am moving deeper in.”
“I thought you felt no guilt about what you did.”
“It’s not about you. It’s not about me, either.”
“Is it about forgiveness?”
“It’s about living.”
Silence.
The Crooked Woman rests a hand on the door handle. “You’ll go on alone?”
“I need to—”
“Even if she asked you not to?”
“Because she asked me not to.”
At this the Crooked Woman opens the door, gets up and gets out. She closes the door, and where she stood, there’s nothing no more. For a few seconds, Nil looks at the police station of Candil with its stained walls and the ghostly lights in the distance, then he open the car door and walks in.
Inside the police station, chaos is king. The sound of flabby officers taking up arms they weren’t trained to use fills the air, men and women shouting orders they had hoped would stay on the textbooks forever. Nil cuts through the throng unseen. There is the riot police. There are soldiers. There are operators sweating it out over countless phone calls. It smells like civilization shitting its pants.
“I’d like to turn myself in,” says Nil at the main desk.
The officer looks up, the phone held between ear and shoulder, his face scrunched up as he eyes Nil’s designer clothes. “Tonight?” he says. The Ring is melting.
“I need to see the Commissioner.” Nil tastes courage on his lips. It, too, tastes like gunpowder. When the man shakes his head, he adds, “He’s a friend of my father’s. I am the heir to Worlds United, and I am guilty of rape.” Live, unburied, live.
The officer looks at him as if he were a lunatic, but he hangs up, picks up the phone again and deals.
Nil turns and looks at the crowd hurrying past the doors, cars and bikes revving their engines before disappearing into the night. The police station empties. The hand of the Commissioner rests on his shoulder.
Nil meets his eyes. “I—”
“Please,” he cuts him off, “in my office, sir.” Death is scribbled all over his face.
Nil follows him into his office. He feels no fear. It feels right.
The Commissioner sits on the other side of his desk. Nil leaves the door open. The Commissioner stands and closes it. His hands are shaking. He sits on the corner of the desk. The office smells like truth, and the truth smells like quality coffee served in a dirty cup.
“Three years ago—”
“Stop.”
Nil pushes his glasses up his nose. “Excuse me?”
“Is this a test?”
“What?”
“I am loyal.” He looks as if he’s just seen a ghost. “I will do it.”
“You need to arrest me.”
But the Commissioner says nothing, he simply sits there, his mouth half open, his eyes fixed somewhere around Nil’s belt.
“You need to—”
“Please.” He is covered in sweat, his skin made almost translucent, almost pale in spite of his darker complexion.
“You...” Nil starts again, but he trails off. Something’s wrong. On instinct he thinks about the door shut behind him.
Silence falls.
The Commissioner stands and turns facing away, his voice breaking as he stammers something unintelligible. Nil takes a step forward, trying to understand what he’s saying, when the Commissioner shouts at the top of his lungs to the wall before him. Nil winces and takes a step back, and there is something feral about this, but no, he won’t let it discourage him. This is truth. This is hope.
Nil takes a breath. “Three years ago I raped the maid working at my parents’ house,” he says, raising his voice, “and Ameen covered it up.”
“No,” the Commissioner yells. He turns, and the tendons in his neck look tensed to the point where his lips curl, baring his teeth. “You will need to hold me at gunpoint before I put the son of the biggest mobster in the country in jail.”
Nil shakes his head, his eyes wide open, lost for words.
“Please,” says the Commissioner. “After this, I am out. You people said that.”
A beat.
“Who is you?”
The Commissioner looks at him, animal fear in his eyes. “Her.”
Nil recoils. It feels like wearing a broken watch. It feels like forgetting about it and checking the time. He walks out in a trance. There is nobody in the street. He gets in the car. There is nobody in the car.
“There is no right thing to do.”
He sends Ferang a text, starts the engine and drives back home. Waiting for Ferang, Nil plays with the Nintendo Switch he purchased on the gray market, the joystick in one hand, the blood of his own bit cuticles on the other.
The doorbell rings.
“The Pit already in revolt?” Nil asks, opening the door.
Ferang steps in. “Everything’s fine,” he says. It’s a lie, but Nil can see right through it now. He closes the door behind him.
“We always consider what is hidden to be truer than what is in broad daylight,” Ferang says. “Why do you think?”
Nil draws a long breath, a loud one, one he for once doesn’t try to muffle. “I don’t give a fuck, Ferang,” he says. “Do you have it?”
A beat.
Then Ferang, gaily, “Won’t you even woo me?”
Nil feels in no mood for kidding around. Ferang fishes a packet of dark powder from the pocke
t of his jeans and, walking into the kitchen, he opens the silverware drawer and takes a tasteful Cutipol Goa spoon. While working, he keeps on making small talk.
“You know what’s the problem?” he says, ripping the plastic open. “The problem is that we hate being called liars but we love lying.”
“I’m done with,” says Nil, a sense of lightness pervading him.
Ferang gathers a few drops of water from the purifier with the spoon. “Are you?”
Nil goes silent.
“Are you?” repeats Ferang, pouring the powder into the spoon, mixing it with a toothpick.
Again Nil says nothing.
“Giants will fall tonight. We only have each other.” Satisfied of the mixture, Ferang turns on the stove and sets the spoon over the flame. A dark, aggressive smell fills the room. Ferang looks up, in his eyes an almost unhinged spark. “So you won’t tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“You know, what happened three years ago.”
Nil runs a hand over his face. “Why?”
“Because—” Ferang stops, his mouth half open, just like a stage actor. “I’m your best friend.”
“Why?” says Nil, his voice shaking.
“Tell me, Nil. I’m listening.”
“Why?” Nil can’t help but raise his voice.
The drug is boiling.
“I want you to trust me,” Ferang cries in turn, “is it too much to ask?”
Breathless, Nil turns to the dining room dropping his chin to his chest and covering his mouth with his hand. The smell knows no barriers, and Nil is no longer sure he wants to do it, but the Whole has saturated every centimeter of his being, filling him completely.
“Please Ferang, let’s talk about something else,” says Nil. “I need to distract myself. When I think about it, I feel like falling.”
“What about the truth we always preach?”
“I’m sick of it, Ferang. I just want to be.”
“What about doing the right thing?”
“The right thing?”
“There is no purpose,” screams Ferang all of a sudden. A pause. Ferang turns around and smiles, holding up a syringe and a tourniquet, and the syringe looks harmless and light but the tourniquet irascible and arrogant, and with that light in the depth of his eyes, Ferang steps forward. The syringe is filled with heroin. “So holy,” Ferang says, “so crooked.”
Objects in the Mirror Page 36